Experian

My experience with Experian has revealed so much more than meets the eye, from their unfair and unreasonable scoring system, to the faults they never admit, and to many very well sought plans to drag customers into staying with them and paying them more and more each month, in the hope of "keeping their identities safe" and "improving their credit scoring" which always is, by pure coincidence, poor at the beginning, and with mistakes that need rectifying for a few months until subscriptions and charges have been paid.

I am disgusted by even the thought of the latest happenings, so I will just cut it short and give you the main facts, so that maybe someone reading this would learn a few things before falling for the traps carefully designed to make the maximum profit from customers who are desperate for any service affected by this agency's scoring.

1- A bad score made me sign up, and look on Experian's website for "ways to improve my score" and for "credit cards and lenders that match my score". By taking their quick surveys, I was re-directed to what should be a perfect match to my score according to their systems. Without even being asked, or having an option to opt in or out, I was taken to a screen where it said that my details have been passed on to matching creditors who will contact me shortly. And they weren't joking, I started getting all those calls from several creditors, who are willing to "help", taking my details, and then promising to find me the proper offer, only to be called again by more of those companies. At the end, I saw that my credit report was searched by tens of lenders at the same time, bringing my score down from 389 to 66! That is through their own "help".

2- I tried their online credit score forecast meter, where from a few questions, a predicted score would come up. I answered them all with the poorest and worst answers, from having CCJ, to being late on payments, and having 8 or more creditors (although I have none of these). The result came to 177. That would be the score of someone with the worst possible history. And mine was 66!! That shows how accurate and fair their system is.

3- Their experienced staff and reps always manage to make you feel like they're helping you "understand" how it works and how to make it better, while all they do is stall and give you advice that will only take ages to happen, the longer they do that, the more you pay...

4- 2 other major agencies score much higher and with much less mistakes, and they still insist their scoring system is fair. There is always something wrong on the report, few of my friends tried them and we all had to send notices of corrections and call them for days and days until we find out where the mistake is coming from.

Those people are experts alright! Credit experts? I don't think so. Maybe Credit destroying experts if anything. They should be reported and someone should do something about this unfair and advantage taking behaviour.